Sunday, October 25, 2009

Graffiti art is a big problem in Russia, not only in the cities but in the suburbs as well.

Artists scrawl all over public buildings with no regard for what the citizens of the area feel at all and one group of grandparents is sick of it.

They are the members of the SSAE, the Samaritan Street Art Elders. In an attempt to make the streets more child friendly this group has been going around and making their own graffiti, covering up the paintings they consider inappropriate with brighter, more cheerful art of their own devising. They want their children and grandchildren to be able to develop "good taste" from an early age, and in the interest of fostering this goal they not only paint pictures but they also write poems to go along with them. They are proud to say that their strategy has worked. Since the inception of their project all unrelated graffiti art has all but ceased.